Simon Callow remembers Snoo Wilson: his work was 'the stuff of dreams'

Snoo Wilson kept bees in his garden in Clapham and knew them all by name

Snoo Wilson's collected plays constitute a glorious Corybantic frieze covering vast tracts of human experience, filtered through an imagination that took in anthropology, history, physics, alchemy, mathematics, painting and the occult. He was political, but in the way that Aristophanes was political – rude, lewd, uproarious, anarchic; he plugged himself and his characters into other worlds, other dimensions, the Neptunian, the lunar, the chthonic, the galactic, all in a riotous carnival spirit, knockabout, grotesque, strutting their stuff in a kind of metaphysical music hall.

The one thing that seemed barely to interest him at all was psychology, which put him beyond the pale for many reviewers; he committed the fatal error of being unclassifiable, which in Britain condemns a man to the margins. Audiences never had any difficulty with his work, which was instantly recognisable as the stuff of dreams, freely leaping about in time and space, swarming with creatures from the id nimbly outwitted by the representatives of the ego. Each play was an intracranial epic, a succession of impossibly tall stories that liberated the theatre from plodding linearity and mendacious cause and effect. They were shocking, funny and often surprisingly tender.

And they were a perfect reflection of the man who created them. Madcap, emotional, anarchic, erudite, in touch with the universe, bewildered by pettiness, fantastical, curious, practical, noble, mischievous, good-hearted. He made his own bread, he kept bees in his garden in Clapham and knew them all by name, he had instant rapport with any animal he ever met, he devoured books, always having five on the go at once, he cast astrological charts, he laughed till he wept, he danced till he dropped, he knew everything about everything. He was, in his madly quirky way, a great man, a titan, a bit of a genius. How I loved that man.

"Boogions-nous?" he used to say, and we did, all of us who knew him, we boogied blissfully away under the inspiration of his great sense of the infinitude of possibilities contained in a human life.

We worked together again and again, he and I. I acted in his plays, I directed them; we worked on screenplays that were never filmed and on shows that were never staged; we sped across Sicily to recce a never to be shot film about Aleister Crowley. We drove wildly about from Monreale to Enna and Taormina; we ascended Etna, and each of these places shook him to the core with the seismic power of history and the life lived in them, until it was impossible to know which century he and I were alive in.